Rangelands, Drylands & Pastoralism

The adoption of crop-livestock integration (CLI) among smallholder farmers in the developing countries is no doubt one of the solutions to food security, risk management, and poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa. However, adequate assessment on the current status of CLI becomes necessary for the development and its evolution among smallholder farmers.

Communities in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, have established exclosures on formerly degraded grazing lands and other land uses to promote natural regeneration of plants. Village bylaws devised by communities govern the management of exclosures.

Woody encroachment affects the biohydrology of rangelands worldwide and can increase evapotranspiration by increasing plant rooting depth, increasing the duration of the growing season, or by initiating a process of hydrologic recovery in formerly overgrazed landscapes.

This paper presents a bioeconomic analysis of a red deer population within a Norwegian institutional context. This population is managed by a well-defined manager, typically consisting of many landowners operating in a cooperative manner, with the goal of maximizing the present-value hunting related income while taking browsing and grazing damages into account.

Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China.

The environmental consequences of agriculture are of growing concern. One example of these consequences is the effect of agricultural pollutants on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), a world heritage-listed ecosystem lying off the tropical north-eastern coast of Australia.

Our knowledge of plant functional group effects on ecosystem processes is relatively well established, but we know much less on how changes in plant phenotypic composition affect ecosystem functioning (i.e., phenotypic functional composition).

Nomadic pastoralism has thrived in Asia’s rangelands for several millennia by tracking seasonal changes in forage productivity and coping with a harsh climate. This pastoralist lifestyle, however, has come under intense transformations in recent decades due to socio-political and land use changes.

As the world urbanizes, the role of cities in determining sustainability outcomes grows in importance. Cities are the dominant form of human habitat, and most of the world's resources are either directly or indirectly consumed in cities. Sustainable city analysis and management requires understanding the demands a city places on a wider geographical area and its ecological resource base.

The net effect of heavy grazing and land degradation on plant diversity and richness is insufficiently understood for incorporation in national biodiversity assessments. A study was undertaken to determine the effects of heavy grazing primarily on richness of vascular plant species across the arid and semi-arid rangeland biomes of South Africa.

In South Africa, the relative extent of range degradation under freehold compared to communal tenure has been strongly debated. We present a perspective on the processes that drive rangeland degradation on land under communal tenure.

Land and agrarian reform has the potential to expand South Africa's rangeland commons and enhance their contribution to the livelihoods of the rural poor, yet to a large extent this has been an opportunity missed.